“Won’t he be cold in the winter? To think—to think! His eyes have seen all the things that my Daniel wrote about! He may have seen Dan’s dear self!”
The parcels fell; but “Obi” only stooped quickly and picked them up again. He remembered in time the appalling fright that his black paws would bring to Minnie if they closed suddenly around her. He turned and went his way, then, looking round, he was in time to see Titus offer his arm to Minnie Sweetland and to mark that she refused it.
The black man winked great tears out of his eyes. He had not cried since he was a child.
“My own li’l, dear, dinky wife! The shape of her—the lovely voice of her! ‘Won’t he be cold in the winter?’ She axed that. ‘No, by God, he won’t!’ I had ’pon the tip of my tongue to tell her. But ’tis lucky I held it in, for it might have spoilt all.”
Deep in thought, Daniel returned to Middlecott Court. At the lodge gates he stood a moment, and stared up at the metal Diana with the bullet-hole under her breast. Once he had thought her a remarkable curiosity. Now, since his eyes had seen some of the world’s wonders, she seemed a poor thing upon her lofty pedestal. Somebody moved at the lodge gate and he knew that it was his mother. Instinctively he turned his head away and hurried forward.
There are no more profound disguises than a silent tongue and a black face. Even Titus Sim had not the least suspicion that Sweetland now lived at his elbow and listened to his every utterance. But Sim’s subtle genius never deserted him. No man had heard him say one unkind word of Daniel; many had listened to his fierce reproofs when others ventured to criticise the vanished man. Perfectly he played his part, and Daniel often warmed to the friend who could thus defend him and fight for his good name, even though, with the rest of the world, he supposed that his old comrade was dead and buried deep in the blue waters of the Caribbean.
CHAPTER XVII
THE CONFESSION
Rix Parkinson had been a handsome man, but now disease and the shadow of death were upon his countenance; he had long sunk into a chronic crapulence, and only his eyes, that shone from a wasted and besotted face, retained some natural beauty. He was dying, but vitality still flashed up in him, and no physician could with certainty predict whether a week or a month might remain to him. Parkinson’s home adjoined that wherein young Samuel Prowse lived with his mother; and this woman it was who of her charity ministered to the sufferer, and carried out the doctor’s orders.